Bernadette McNulty reviews the first part of Inside Death Row with Trevor
McDonald, a new ITV series in which the broadcaster ventures inside one of
America's most notorious maximum security prisons.

SirTrevor McDonaldwas trying to achieve a more objective voice in the first episode of Inside Death Row(ITV). American executions are a continual source of fascination and often moral high-grounding for British viewers, an appetite most recently fed by Werner Herzog’s trilogy of films on the subject broadcast on Channel 4 in March last year. McDonald’s style felt much more old-fashioned as he spent two weeks in Indiana’s maximum security state prison. The 73-year-old wandered around in his suit, “do you minding” at every encounter like journalism’s answer to Professor Higgins.

Many of the prisoners he encountered, spending most of their adult life in each other’s company, seemed to know their neighbour’s character and habits as if they were an old married couple. One, who had spent a decade in his shoebox cell, said that he was “just getting it how he liked it”. He sounded like a proud homeowner. Segregated from the other inmates, the condemned men starkly lived in dark, windowless rows of cages that made it look like a dog’s home.

The lifers barely had much more room, their beds semi-divided like desks in an open-plan office. In some ways, the division between the two camps seemed somewhat absurd, given that lifers were often on sentences of hundreds of years that meant that they would die in prison, and those on death row were often held for decades before they were marched off for their dose of lethal poison.

None-the-less they were different worlds and McDonald’s formal, opaque approach seemed to make the prisoners respond, opening up to him honestly about their crimes, their guilt and in fragments, their despair. Delicately he managed to expose the fine lines between abhorrence and sympathy you felt for these men living without any chance of redemption.